[IAEP] [fonc] Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)

[Jameson Quinn]

2012/3/14 C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org>

> On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 6:02 PM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> If you're going to base it on Javascript, at least make it
>> Coffeescript-like. I also agree that some basic parallelism primitives
>> would be great; it is probably possible to build these into a
>> Coffeescript-like dialect using JS under the hood (though they'd probably
>> optimize even better if you could implement them natively instead of in
>> JS).
>
>
> I think you are underestimating the value of using a standard
> widely-deployed language.  I love languages as much as the next guy---but
> our previous learning environment (Sugar) has had incredible difficulty
> getting local support outside the US because it is written in *Python*.
>  Python is "not a commercially viable language" (not my words) and you
> can't even take university classes in Python in many countries (say,
> Uruguay) because there is no company behind it and no one who will give you
> a "certificate" for having learned it.
>

Anyone who can write JS can learn to write CS in 15 minutes, and vice
versa. But CS is a friendlier syntax.

I understand that that's not good enough. But if JS and CS were fully
automatically intraconvertible, a goal which I think is not impossible, I
think it would be.

>
> This is very sad, but the true state of affairs.
>
> JavaScript is not perfect, but at heart it is a functional object-oriented
> language which is pretty darn close to Good Enough.  There are huge
> benefits to using a language which is supported by training materials all
> over the web, university systems outside the US, etc, etc.
>
> I am open to *very* slight extensions to JavaScript -- OMeta/JS and
> quasiquote might squeeze in -- but they have to be weighed against their
> costs.  Subsets are even more problematic -- once you start subsetting,
> then you are throwing away compatibility with all the wealth of JavaScript
> libraries out there, in addition to confusing potential contributors who
> are trying to type in examples they found in some book.
>    --scott
>
> --
>       ( http://cscott.net )
>
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